CRAIG CONLEY (Prof. Oddfellow) is recognized by Encarta as “America’s most creative and diligent scholar of letters, words and punctuation.” He has been called a “language fanatic” by Page Six gossip columnist Cindy Adams, a “cult hero” by Publisher’s Weekly, a “monk for the modern age” by George Parker, and “a true Renaissance man of the modern era, diving headfirst into comprehensive, open-minded study of realms obscured or merely obscure” by Clint Marsh. An eccentric scholar, Conley’s ideas are often decades ahead of their time. He invented the concept of the “virtual pet” in 1980, fifteen years before the debut of the popular “Tamagotchi” in Japan. His virtual pet, actually a rare flower, still thrives and has reached an incomprehensible size. Conley’s website is OneLetterWords.com.

I dreamed again I was allowed to marry another semicolon. Our wedding
was conducted by San Francisco Superior Court Judge James Warren, who
kept saying, "I am not trying to be petty here, but it is a big deal
... That semicolon is a big deal."

Later that night, I dreamed that I discussed my marriage with Rick
Boyer, who said: "Like punctuation marks, milestones break up, to a
degree, the continuity of daily experience. And like those little
black marks, they add dimensions to the text of our lives, extra
meaning that otherwise we would fail to read. Nate's upcoming
wedding day, like a speed bump, to some degree sneaked up on us despite
the fact that we've been looking forward to it. What is it about
weddings, anyway? You have one marked on the calendar for perhaps
a year or two; yet, two weeks before the event all is madness and
pandemonium as both families scramble to get ready. ... Our coming 'big
day' reminds me that milestones - those punctuation marks of life - are
liberally dispersed for all and that life is not one uninterrupted
stream but a book with a beginning and an end. It has sentences
and paragraphs, set apart by punctuation marks, that add up to chapters
which sometimes we don't recognize as such until looking back later
over the nearly completed manuscript."